Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 3

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The Future’s Epic Now: The Time of Security and Risk in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis / Johannes Voelz

Keywords: Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, Narratives of Risk and Security, Literature and Financial Speculation, Security and Death, Postsecularism

<1> In this essay I aim to reflect upon the cultural life of security in our contemporary moment. Doing so requires extending security beyond its essentially political functions, i.e., going beyond the currently dominant perspective according to which security is first and foremost an affective and ideological tool of legitimating states of exception. [1] The remarkable success of (in)security — understood as both a concept and a logic — is often explained by its presumed function to manipulate us into accepting untrammeled state power and the loss of civil liberties. If we are not satisfied with this explanation, we need an account of what security offers us on the level of the imagination. As I want to show in my reading of DeLillo, security holds out uses to the imagination that are much more complex and far‐reaching than an incitation for the desire of authoritarian leadership. [2]

<2> I will start out by explicating my understanding of security and then proceed to analyze DeLillo’s novel. I will be stressing that what makes Cosmopolis insightful lies in the way it merges the logic of security with the logic of risk. As I will explain, security and risk are concepts that are related in that they are both concerned with a future that is seen as uncertain; however, they are usually kept apart because they react to this uncertainty in fundamentally different ways. Yet, while security and risk are thus differentiated from a theoretical perspective, DeLillo’s novel suggests that security has become imbued with characteristics of risk and vice versa. I argue that it is this crossing of categories that can help explain how security has taken up a central position in the current cultural imagination.

<3> Rather than focusing on one particular referent of security (say, national, social, or human), my approach relates the concept of “security” to a distinctly modern grammar of agency, according to which rationality appears as bound up with, and conditioned by, what exceeds its reach. As such, security provides an interpretive frame for actions grounded in uncertainty, encompassing everything from everyday life to international relations. Sociologists have shown that, in Niklas Luhmann’s words, “since the seventeenth century the topics of security and risk have matured in a process of mutual interaction” (Luhmann 1991, 20). The careers of risk and security are linked in that both respond to futures conceived of as contingent: Risk manages uncertainty, security seeks to transform it into order (Bonß 1995, 25). Risk calculates uncertainty, without believing — or wishing — that uncertainty can be undone. Security, on the other hand, attempts to enforce a boundary between inside and outside in order to keep at bay an uncertainty that is perceived as a threat (Münkler 2010, 11–12). A look at the etymology of security and risk confirms this difference: The term “security” goes back to a neologism from Cicero’s time: securitas, derived from sine cura, literally means “without worry,” and is an historical offspring of the Epicurean concept ataraxia (Schrimm‐Heins 1991, 133). “Risk,” on the other hand, takes us to the Italian sea merchants of the 14th century: Rischio or rischiare contains the Greek rhiza, which denotes both root and cliff. Rischiare thus originally meant sailing around cliffs, and by extension, consciously seeking danger because of potential material gain (Münkler 2010, 19). Despite these differences, however, the modern concepts of security and risk emerge together as two responses to the same condition: a future no longer thought of as pre‐determined.

<4> Security’s concern with the future indicates that while it attempts to undo uncertainty, it, too, re‐creates uncertainty. Security designates two things at once: a utopian goal of sine cura, and a set of strategies of getting there. While such strategies presuppose that humans can shape the future in rationally planned ways, security only arises as a project in the face of an uncertainty — more precisely, an insecurity — that takes the form of a threat, i.e., an external force which has the capability of overwhelming humans, thereby reducing them to a passive position. Security and insecurity must be seen as twin categories which let us see the world in a contradictory manner, torn between empowerment and powerlessness. While security implies an active role that projects to avert or prevent threat, and thus to “annihilate the temporality of the future” (Kaufmann 1973, 157), insecurity and threat presuppose a position of passivity and exposure.

<5> The imaginary co‐dependence of security and insecurity not only creates a new space for the irrational in constructing a future world open for rational planning; it similarly creates a space for the postsecular, despite the fact that the modern notion of security is a sign of a secular world view. On the one hand, security becomes meaningful in a secular culture that emphasizes human responsibility over divine providence. On the other hand, security remains dependent on notions of the sacred and transcendent in that it calls forth confrontations with the limits of human power. Security thus emerges as a privileged cultural site at which the religious is negotiated with the non‐religious, and the irrational with the rational.

<6> Security is — unwittingly — more invested than it would like to admit in bringing to the fore our exposure to the uncertain, and it thus seems closer to risk than a simple dichotomy of openness to the uncertain versus its aversion would suggest. Nonetheless, risk and security suggest a different temporal horizon of the ineluctably uncertain future. As I will show, in the logic of risk, the future is endless, even seemingly timeless. From my vantage point, the logic of risk is essentially economic, and from this logic, financial loss of one party is nothing but the next investment possibility. Even death, say as the result of a failed business transaction, becomes quantified and thus continues to circulate in the system. In fact, death can be quantified and profited from reasonably well, even if it is one’s own death (this would be no more than a slight radicalization of the common practice of large banks which sell derivatives that bet on their own default). Risk, in short, does not conceptualize the future from the perspective of the individual entrepreneur, but from that of the system. Individual failure is not the end.

<7> Security, on the other hand, does fuse the future of the collective with that of the individual. The construction of uncertainty as a threat to the collective is modeled on an existential danger to the individual’s body. In the construction of the future from the perspective of security, what is at stake is ultimately survival — or death. As literary scholar Amy Kaplan has noted, “The word [‘security’] does the seductive work of creating a framework for seeing and experiencing the world in a way that fuses the macro level of global and national politics with the intimate world of home and psyche, with the existential level of faith and identity” (16). What is seductive about this is precisely the fact that the macro level is imbued with the urgency of physical survival that is borrowed from the vulnerability of the individual body in facing an imminent threat. [3] Thus, while in the time of risk the uncertain knows no end, in the time of security, uncertainty becomes threatening because it draws a horizon of finality. [4]

II.

<8> This brings me to Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis, which is most centrally concerned with the time of risk, the time of security, and their curious crossing in the experience of the main characters.

<9> Cosmopolis follows asset manager Eric Packer during the course of “a day in April” “in the year 2000” (as stated on the page preceding chapter one), just before the collapse of the boom of the 1990s, which we are implicitly asked to interpret not merely as the end of a millennium, but as the end of an epoch. Wandering through his luxury triplex apartment located on the top floors of Trump Tower near the UN Headquarters (“the tallest residential tower in the world,” [8]), Packer begins his day by deciding on a whim to “get a haircut” (7) in the neighborhood of his childhood — a self‐destructive wish considering that “getting a haircut” also means taking heavy financial losses. His armored limousine takes him from the East River to the Western tip of Manhattan near the docks of the Hudson, from luxury to shabbiness, from the place of his greatest success to the streets of his humble beginnings and eventual demise. By his side we meet a staff consisting of driver, “chief of security,” “chief of technology,” and, a little later, “chief of theory.” Perennially stuck in traffic, his daylong trip leaves him enough time to eat in restaurants, linger in hotel rooms, have sex with four different women, among them his “wife of twenty‐two days” (15), watch the assassination of the International Monetary Fund’s managing director on the screens of his car, begrudge the U.S. President his even larger security apparatus, become witness of an anti‐globalization protest, take part in the funeral procession of a Sufi rap star, and squander all of his assets — and those of his multimillionaire wife — in the financial markets.

<10> Cosmopolis structures time in a paradoxical manner by narratively fleshing out what it might mean to be “summoned… to live permanently in the future,” as DeLillo had put it in his essay “In the Ruins of the Future” (33). That essay, published shortly after the attacks of September 11, interpreted the attacks as beginning a new age — an age of terror — that would displace the optimism and future‐mindedness of the 1990s. If the new economy had summoned people to live permanently in the future, Cosmopolis may be interpreted as a memorial to that by‐gone era, capturing, in DeLillo’s words, “the last day of an era” (qtd. in Barron 2003, 1). However, I would argue against such a narrative of 9/11 as marking a moment of rupture and rather interpret Cosmopolis as speaking to our time. And in fact, David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of the novel makes exactly this point in the trailer, claiming in large letters that it is “THE FIRST FILM ABOUT OUR NEW MELLENNIUM.” [5]

<11> Living “permanently in the future” itself seems like a paradoxical phrase considering that permanence suggests standstill whereas the future refers to the yet‐to‐come, that is, to transience and progress. But in Cosmopolis, this paradox is precisely what living in the future amounts to. The tension between permanence and impermanence takes the form of giving the future the air of a timeless present, which is, however, rendered as an epic past. I will argue that this “epic now” of the future marks DeLillo’s literary instantiation of the time of risk.

<12> DeLillo’s time of risk is derived most immediately from the world of finance capitalism. What is offered in financial markets is time, or, more precisely, the future. DeLillo’s characters (and he himself) have a hyperbolic way of speaking about living in the future but the hyperbole is lessened when one considers what “future” signifies within the logic of the market.

<13> In this context, we must differentiate two forms of the future. Sociologist Elena Esposito’s formulation is helpful here: She distinguishes between “the present future (tomorrow as it appears from the perspective of today) and the future present (the one that will come about tomorrow)” (127). In the world of financial markets, the future present is calculated on the basis of the present future, and these calculations influence both the future present and the present future. Nonetheless, the future present will differ from the present future. It will differ even if the projection of the present future is a good one because the projection’s “correctness” will have effects (for instance, imitators might copy those who are successful) that transform congruity between present future and future present into incongruity. In Esposito’s words, “if done well, [future projections] anticipate the way the future would have come about if there had been no attempt to foresee it” (128).

<14> Eric Packer is involved in just such calculations: he invests in risky stocks that might yield high returns, but for the investment itself he borrows large quantities of yen on the projection that the value of the yen will drop. If the yen drops, he will have to pay back less money and the yield of the total transaction will be even greater. Packer’s procedure is highly “leveraged”: in the language of economists, leverage indicates that only little capital is required for potentially very high returns. Instead of capital, his investment is financed primarily through debt (he borrows yen), which firmly places his dealings in the money‐time‐business of credit money. Packer’s risk is multifold: only if the stock prices rise and the yen drops will he make money. If the yen rises — which is exactly what happens in the novel — Packer may not be able to pay back his debt, unless his stocks yield an even greater profit. Throughout the novel, Packer observes how the yen is developing, how its price is rising; he keeps buying more and more of the currency — against the advice of his team — on the conviction that the yen will adjust to the projections of his charts; and in line with the reflexive influence of present future and future present, it is partially as a result of his decision to keep borrowing that the yen keeps climbing: “His actions regarding the yen were causing storms of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm’s portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger” (116).

<15> Each time Packer is borrowing yen, he juxtaposes present value against future projected value of something that he does not own. His business lies in the difference between present future (which determines the amount he will have to pay back) and future present (which is unknown at this point but will determine how much that amount will be worth); that difference itself is the reflexive result of the economic activity of dealing with the future.

<16> Rather than referring to some science fiction scenario, the idea of “living in the future” relates to the fact that, in his actions, Packer inhabits this space between two futures, and this in‐between must be thought of as a mathematical difference. In Esposito’s words: “the future is not the present future or the future present, but difference of the two” (127).

<17> What makes Cosmopolis interesting does not merely arise from the fact that what its characters say about the future, money, etc., or how they behave as speculators, illustrates the world of financial markets. The ultimate interest of the novel rather lies in the way this world of risk, and further down the road, the world of security, are experienced by the characters, and the ways in which DeLillo aestheticizes these worlds.

<18> A most remarkable transformation in the aesthetic realm concerns the way living in the future is experienced in the novel: for, surprisingly, in its appearance in the text, the permanent future of risk becomes a permanent present.

<19> The permanent present relates to plot structure, style, particularly with respect to dialogue, and characterization. For the level of plot structure, I take up the suggestions of Joseph Vogl, who, in Das Gespenst des Kapitals [The Specter of Capital], productively reads Cosmopolis in the context of the epic. While the novel may most immediately be a satirical take on James Joyce’s Ulysses (cf. Conte 2008, 181), Vogl extends the intertextual lineage to Dante, and Homer’s Odyssey. As he observes, while the modern novel is concerned with the rules that provide order for singular incidents (17), Cosmopolis, like the classics of the epic tradition, structures incidents loosely and episodically: “they manifest themselves as external forces and hardships, turn calamitous, and, being integrated into a web, escalate into the dimension of fate” (15). [6] Resulting from this epic plot structure without clear beginning and end, the present is no longer part of a temporal chain that leads from the past to the present and future, but rather consists of an assemblage of dehierarchized moments.

<20> The endlessness of the present also arises from the way Packer interacts with others in a shared time of simultaneity. As one would expect from the characters in a DeLillo novel, simultaneity, like the future, is taken up as a fascinating topic of quasi‐theoretical reflection. Shiner, Eric Packer’s “chief of technology,” marvels at a sort of technological sublime derived from the simultaneity of everything, which cannot be grasped: “Things happen like bang. This and that simultaneous. I put out my hand and what do I feel? I know there’s a thousand things you analyze every ten minutes. Patterns, ratios, indexes, whole maps of information. I love information. This is our sweetness and light. It’s a fuckall wonder” (14). Shiner himself is so much a reflection of Packer that his sentences might also come from his boss. Indeed, DeLillo’s dialogues do not assign names to the direct speech on the page, making it at times almost impossible — but also pointless — to figure out who’s saying what.

<21> In fact, in Cosmopolis — again this is typical of DeLillo — dialogue does not substantially differ from monologue.[7] To this end, we find in Cosmopolis a stylistic element that characterizes both forms of speech: I’m thinking of the short question “what?,” with which speakers frequently interrupt themselves. Here are two instances:

Packer: “That I’m a powerful person who chooses not to demarcate his territory with singular driblets of piss is what? Is something I need to apologize for?” (39)

Packer’s view as told by the narrator: “Directly in front of him, what? People in the traffic island buying discounted theater tickets.” (87)

Packer’s view as told by the narrator: “He wanted to take her [his wife] out in the alley and have sex with her. Beyond that, what? He did not know.” (122)

<22> Throughout the book, the interrogative “what?” is a linguistic tic, a vernacular filler, a signal that speech has overtaken thought and requires a pause, and an indicator that the verbalization of thought can indeed be interrupted without loss because the completion of the ideas suspended by the interrogative can be combined in modular fashion: anything fits any time because all possible answers seem to be known and shared. The language of the vernacular “what?” is the language of simultaneity and interchangeability: anyone can complete anyone else’s sentences because they consist of interchangeable elements. By way of “what?,” one character’s speech becomes another character’s simultaneous thought. [8]

<23> Simultaneity and interchangeability, perhaps surprisingly, also echo with the epic tradition because they help create the type of hero Hegel identified as belonging to the epic. The epic hero, for Hegel, is an organic part of his world, but — and this is where epic poetry differs from tragedy — that world has an “objective” dimension which remains independent of and external to the hero. For this reason, Hegel differentiates between action and event. Action refers to the path of the hero, his quest, his motives, his interpretations; the events surpass the subjective level of the hero and describe the totality of society, as it happens in the form of incidents, from a perspective independent of the hero.

<24> Eric Packer may be regarded as an epic hero because he is situated in a world made up of actions and events. He is the essential character of the action: it is his money, his decisions; he is what the narrator calls a “saturated self” (208). At the same time, he confronts events that appear as fate. As an organic particularization of the totality and spirit of “a nation and epoch” (Hegel 1975, 1044), he is a representative self: modular, interchangeable, typical in his self‐centeredness. We get to know him early on as a genius of sorts — “he mastered the steepest matters in half an afternoon” (7) —, but even as megalomania distorts his sense of perception, he is a representative man much more than an individual isolated from the outer world. On the contrary, he blends into his world, if in a manner wildly out of proportion: Standing outside Trump Tower, “he felt contiguous with it. … They shared an edge or boundary, skyscraper and man” (8). Even his state of the art high‐security limo is far from unique: Walking across First Avenue, he is confronted with “lines of white limousines ... identical at a glance” (9). He watches the drivers who are waiting each for their own Eric Packer: “they waited for the investment banker, the land developer, the venture capitalist, for the software entrepreneur, the global overlord of satellite and cable, the discount broker, the beaked media chief, for the exiled head of state of some smashed landscape of famine and war” (10).

<25> As an epic hero, Eric Packer is an outstanding individual who is nonetheless exchangeable, and to the extent that his world is the totality of a particular time or epoch, Packer lives in a time of simultaneity where everything is of the same temporal order, where incidents are seemingly not connected by cause and effect, and where the connection between the epoch presented and all other epochs is left suspended.

<26> It is for this reason that Mikhail Bakhtin speaks of the unbridgeable distance of the events of the epic, a temporal distance that, in the case of Cosmopolis, puts the timeless present in a past unconnected to the current reader. As Bakhtin explains in “Epic and Novel”:

In general, the world of high literature in the classical era was a world projected into the past, on to the distanced plane of memory, but not into a real, relative past tied to the present by uninterrupted temporal transitions; it was projected rather into a valorized past of beginnings and peak times. This past is distant, finished and closed like a circle. (19)

For Bakhtin, the epic past is not past because it is situated temporally before the contemporaneous present (before would imply a relative past); placing events in a past rather allows for their hierarchical valorization. Cosmopolis stages the inner perception of such an epic past as an out‐of‐timeness, and endless present. The characters experience this endless present as living in the future; the text presents the endless present as the world‐view of a distanced past, a bygone era. Thus, the time of risk — the engagement in the difference between present future and future present — appears as a timeless present that is presented as an epic past unconnected to the present history.

<27> However, as I want to show now, the time of risk in Cosmopolis is also a time of security, and as a result of this conflation, the distance between epic past and history is crossed by the prospect of violence, a prospect that is at once threatening survival and enabling a kind of transcendence.

III.

<28> Cosmopolis not only stages the time of risk; it also presents us with a world obsessed with security. At first glance, these two concerns seem to be complementary logics in a delicate balance: while Packer seeks to profit from the uncertainty of the open future in the financial markets, he tries everything to ward off uncertainty in the physical domain. We get detailed descriptions of the special security features of his limousine, and we see Packer communicate endlessly about the diagnosis of threats. Packer continuously seeks reassurance from his security team that his networks are “secure” (10) and “safe from penetration” (22). And not only is the action steered by the security threats directed at Packer, but, to Packer’s dismay, his course through Manhattan is determined also by security threats to others, most gratingly to the U.S. president.

<29> Cosmopolis stages a conflict between the two logics of risk and security. Again, in their pure form, risk and security point in opposite directions. Risk manages uncertainty, security seeks to transform it into order (cf. Bonß 1995, 25). Yet, as explained earlier, security can imagine the transformation of uncertainty into order only by engaging in the imagination of insecurity, i.e., by imagining uncertainty as threat.

<30> Cosmopolis, I want to argue here, takes up the double‐sidedness of security — its investment in sine cura and in threat—and radicalizes it by increasingly confounding the distinction between risk and security. Risk and security do not exactly become indistinguishable. Rather, in DeLillo’s imagination, security becomes risk‐laden and risk absorbs qualities associated with security.

<31> The most immediate manner in which the novel integrates security into a framework of risk is by treating security threats and protective measures as a cost integral to the risk economy. Threat, in that sense, is not the antithesis of economic speculation, but merely one of those things one has to take into consideration, a cost of economic activity.

<32> The best emblem of the subordination of security to risk is Eric Packer’s stretch limousine: it is at once an armored vehicle and his office. The stretch limo’s protective measures close off Packer from the outside world, but at the same time, the limo is what puts him in touch with that world both virtually and physically: on the computer screens inside the car he monitors the performance of his assets and watches the news; but the limo also takes him places and puts him in various scenes of interaction. The limousine’s doors open frequently, letting people in and Packer out.

<33> More crucially, Packer repeatedly turns security measures inside out, against himself. Here, security’s underside, insecurity, becomes connected to the thrill of the open future that lies at the heart of financial ventures. This happens at several key moments of the book. Once Packer has sex in a hotel room with a female bodyguard. After the act, he convinces her to shoot him with her stun gun. For Packer, this is the true consummation of the act: “The voltage had jellified his musculature for ten or fifteen minutes and he’d rolled about on the hotel rug, electroconvulsive and strangely elated, deprived of his faculties of reason” (115). Later on, Packer shoots his chief of security Torval as the latter sets off his voice‐controlled gun at the very moment Packer is pointing it at him. Finally, Packer uses a handgun in the showdown with his killer. But instead of shooting at his opponent, he shoots himself in the hand.

<34> These moments of self‐inflicted pain and injury are in some cases directly related to Packer’s activity on the markets. Thus, after the stun gun incident with his bodyguard, he goes on a spending spree, buying huge quantities of yen, which prolongs the orgasmic effect of the electric shock:

The yen spree was releasing Eric from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual, attuned to the registers of his lower brain and gaining distance from the need to take inspired action, make original judgments, maintain independent principles and convictions, all the reasons why people are fucked up and birds and rats are not. (115)

Spending money — the quintessential activity in the business of risk — is somatically aligned with having the security apparatus turned against himself. Security here no longer stands as an opposite strategy of risk, but, by drawing on its underside, by reversing it, it rather becomes a physical expression of speculation.

<35> If the security apparatus — turned — against — itself provides a physical dimension to the logic of risk, it is also here that risk appropriates elements of security: security and insecurity bind the increasingly abstract calculations of the market to the body, pain, and death. The vulnerable body runs like a thread through novel: Packer is obsessed with the fear of cancer, of which the unevenness of his own body — something that cannot be calculated or charted—may or may not be an expression. “His prostate was asymmetrical” (8) is one of the book’s refrains, a thought that shoots through Packer’s mind repeatedly, which is the reason for his daily medical checkups and a prolonged examination in the limousine. Without simply constructing the body’s mortality, its finite dimensions, and its imperviousness to calculation as an antithesis to market logic, the novel unfolds an ambiguity contained in the specter of death that enters the book through the invocation of the logic of security. Death signifies a triumphant return of the real, but also a form of transcendence continuous with the virtualization of the market. [9]

<36> This ambiguity is fully dramatized in the book’s final scene. Packer’s odyssey through Manhattan has led him to an encounter with his murderer, Richard Sheets, in an old warehouse. Sheets is a former employee of Packer’s, who could not stand the virtuality of Packer’s world — he boasts, “I still have my bank that I visit systematically to look at the last literal dollars remaining in my account” (60) — and who is thus well‐suited to embody the real, the authentic, the final: death. The ultimate failure of the security apparatus and also the fulfillment of the fantasy of insecurity, the confrontation with the killer seems to lift Packer out of virtual and timeless futurity, into the self‐identical reality of sheer life and death.

But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn’t think, to computer emulation. The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data ... He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. (207)

Finally, in feeling his body ache, he registers his material, finite self, “all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind‐without‐end” (208).

<37> Yet, the death scene is drawn out endlessly, and as Sheets finally shoots Packer, death — and with it, the logic of (in)security — is reinserted into the difference between present future and future present. Watching his own death on the screen of his watch before he has been shot, he reenters a timeless moment of eternity: “His hand contains the pain of his life, all of it, emotional and other, and he closes his eyes one more time. This is not the end. He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound” (209).

<38> On the face of it, this moment marks the final triumph of the logic of risk. Waiting for the shot to sound, Packer is waiting for the future present to elide its difference from the present future. However, his experience immediately preceding this endgame has changed the tone. The reassertion of life‐and‐death matters that I have been linking to the security paradigm has enabled a kind of redemption of a life hitherto lived virtually: back to the body, back to pain, back to the real. As we have seen, the novel’s final sentences reveal this redemption to have taken place within the time of risk; consequently, it lingers dangerously close to the brink of changing its meaning and undoing itself. Yet, the imminence of death remains acute: we have left the endless chain of future present and present future. If Packer is dead on his watch, but still alive in original space, the in‐between space he inhabits no longer lets him do business with the future but merely allows him to ponder the end. [10] Yet, if this is not the end, the continuity Packer intimates differs from that which characterizes the time of risk. It constitutes what can be described as transcendence. The existential heft of security colors the endless future of risk. What used to be abstract timelessness has become a spiritually charged intimation of salvation: the result of inserting the finality of death into a sphere of timelessness.

<39> Considering the history of security, this move to the sacred is not surprising. In the history of the term, its inherent future‐directedness was for centuries involved in controversies over the right to the future. While the Romans already employed securitas as a label for political stability guaranteed by the empire (and thus used it roughly synonymously with pax romana), beginning around the fourth century A.D., Christian usage turned securitas into a negative term that designated a false sense of safety, based on the argument that the future (and the question of the individual’s salvation) lies in God’s hands. [11] Only in the 17th century, with the revolution of modern science and the establishment of the territorial state, did this negative meaning of securitas slide to the background (cf. Schrimm‐Heins 1992, 171–97). But considering the argument laid out earlier — that security depends on the diagnosis of an insecurity and thus brings to the imagination what lies beyond human control — the concept of security marks an important site at which the debate of who owns the future lingers, even under secular conditions.

<40> Throughout his career, DeLillo, too, has searched out spaces of the sacred and mystical in secular postmodernity, as a quickly growing body of scholarship has recently emphasized. [12] There would be much to say here about how DeLillo actualizes the sacred in Cosmopolis, but at this point, I will have to limit myself to the observation that the mystical generally appears in DeLillo’s plots in the form of an intensified momentary experience, in which the self‐identical materiality of language (of sound, of letters) and of the body reveals itself to individuals (often grouped in make‐shift communities) and facilitates the intimation of transcendence. What is typical, in other words, is precisely a turn from abstraction to the untranslatable concrete, which in a sudden turn‐around leads to spiritual revelation. Regarding Cosmopolis, the concluding death scene may be said to register such a revelatory experience, which is caught up in—indeed enabled by—the crossing of the logics of security and risk.

<41> DeLillo’s novel, I suggest, provides insights into the contemporary imagination of security that are in many ways surprising. Despite the fact that popular discourse and discussions in the humanities tend to link “security” almost exclusively to the state of exception, contemporary security is shot through with an economic rationale of risk. As articulated in Cosmopolis, security, in other words, is not a concept that is primarily defensive and fear‐driven, but encompasses the imagination of future gain emerging from uncertainty. However, the uncertainty emerging in Cosmopolis differs from the type of uncertainty usually associated with risk: it is imbued with the existential dimension that defines the exposure to a threat directed at the bodily real. In this imagination, uncertainty, which appears as insecurity, is feared in a special way: it is a fear that doesn’t lead to flight but rather to reverence; its undercurrent is the promise of extending and expanding the self beyond death. DeLillo’s imagination of security‐steeped‐in‐risk creates a space for a quasi‐religious experience of terrible transcendence. What makes this experience all the more resonant in the present moment is that it is at times impossible to tell apart from the imperial pursuits required of the self in the neoliberal market society. In other words, it is because we live in a world increasingly organized by the economic logic of risk that security has become particularly useful to us. Not because security is somehow a counter‐strategy of risk, but because security has adopted properties of risk and, as a result, has managed to endow our ubiquitous practices of calculating and managing the uncertain future with a postsecular intimation of meaning.

Notes

[1] Carl Schmitt’s notion of the “state of exception,” articulated in Political Theology (1922), has been influentially expanded by Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2003), who has combined it with Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and the idea of “bare life.” Security scholarship in political theory (Dillon and Reid 2001; Dillon and Lobo‐Guerrero 2008; Neocleous 2008) and political geography (Gregory 2007; Kearns 2007) has been detailing how western liberal powers have acted in the manner described by Agamben. In American studies, too, investigations of security—nearly all of them concerned with the period after September 11, 2001 — have predominantly adopted Schmitt’s theorem (Dawson and Schueller 2007; Castronovo and Gillman 2009). The premise of these studies comes out of a tradition of ideology critique: they interrogate texts for the ways in which they make readers acquiesce to the stripping of legal protections of U.S. and foreign citizens, or in which they incite resistance. A sophisticated version of this approach, proposed by Donald E. Pease, adds a psychoanalytic dimension, pointing to political subjects’ ambivalent identification with state law and the desire to transgress it (Pease 2009, 15). For a focus on the artistic mediation of 9/11 in the context of the state of exception, see also the Reconstruction special issue on “Cultural Productions of 9/11” (edited by Christopher Schaberg and Kara Thompson), particularly the essays by Shershow, Kaplan, and Muller.

[2] I am here invoking Rita Felski’s The Uses of Literature, in which she asks us to displace the hermeneutics of suspicion by investigating the aesthetic experience — in both its cognitive and affective dimension — that literature affords. The “uses” of which she speaks are not to be confused with the utilitarian notion of use. They rather address the question, what does a reader get out of a text?

[3] Security constructs uncertainty as an imminent threat and thus employs what Philip Fisher, in “The Aesthetics of Fear,” has called “the classic model” of fear: “from Aristotle to Kant to Darwin to William James, Heidegger, modern psychology, and neurobiology it is this model of a single person facing a threat to his life — a snake, a soldier about to fire, a ship about to sink — that generated our root idea of the salient elements of an experience of fear” (46–47). This scenario differs from the uncertainty created by risk: here, fear is an anxiety about the future. This latter type of fear, which Fisher calls (borrowing a term from Robert Nozick) “general anticipatory fear” (40), is not modeled on an imminent threat and therefore cannot be resolved by “security measures.” It should be stressed that the idea of security involving an imminent threat also informs the most discussed theoretical model of security in International Relations, namely that proposed by the Copenhagen School. In their argument, security is a social construct based on a particular speech act (also called a “securitization”). Such a speech act claims that a group is faced by an existential threat and serves to legitimate extraordinary measures (see Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998). For a critical assessment of the Copenhagen School’s dependence on Carl Schmitt, see Williams 2003.

[4] One might object that in the age of “financial securitization,” the strong difference I propose between risk and security no longer holds. “Securitization” in the financial sense promises to divest risk of any element of uncertainty by backing it with negative assets (debt). In short, the idea is to make risk non‐risky. This notion of “securitization” has little in common with the concept of security I am developing here because security as I conceptualize it depends on co‐evoking the imagination of insecurity. For an analysis of “the reckless use of time” in financial securitization, see Esposito 2011, 125–126.

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS9jc3BnLRc, accessed April 19, 2012.

[6] All translations of Vogl’s text are mine.

[7] DeLillo first explored the fluid distinction between monologue and dialogue in Players (1977). That novel is in many ways an early precursor to Cosmopolis, as it, too, narrativizes financial capitalism and its relation to violence (cf. Heffernan 2007 for a comparative reading).

[8] In Underworld, too, DeLillo frequently uses the vernacular “What?” In that novel, however, the interrogative is integrated into the speech patterns of realistically developed characters, while in Cosmopolis it is freed from its tasks for realistic story‐telling and thus takes on an abstract quality.

[9] Compare Nick Heffernan’s assessment of what he calls Packer’s “quest”: “Like Lyle Wyant’s [in Players], Eric’s quest also proceeds in two directions at once: on the one hand toward heightened physicality through intensified sensual experience; on the other toward the very limits of abstraction as he pushes the logic of cyber‐capital to new extremes” (68).

[10] I here differ from Peter Boxall, who reads the book’s final moment in a positive light, which, in my terminology, reduces it to the paradigm of risk: “He occupies a transitional space that does not know yet whether it is a transition. He occupies a place of pure potential, a space of possibility, that holds itself open for the briefest of periods, waiting for the shot to sound” (232)

[11] Cf. Der Derian 1993, 97–98, Schrimm‐Heins 1991, esp. 133–140.

[12] See especially Hungerford 2006, McClure 1995, 2007, 2008, Osteen 2000, and Schneck 2010.

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